him, remorse that he could so allow himself to speculate on the beneficial results to himself of a fellow-creature's death. But it was not in human nature that he could feel more than a passing pang. Mr. Slaney, though the chosen of the electorate, and the possessor of certain good qualities, as the Moonlight episode showed, was almost as unpopular in the district at large as the miser Duncan, whom everybody hated. Slaney had got into the Legislative Assembly on a reactionary wave, and through the vote of the Irish population on the Diggings. To Frank Hallett he had been privately and publicly obnoxious, and they had had more than one encounter, not wholly of a political nature. Slaney had kept a bush inn, and had made his money, people said, by doctoring the grog. He was a queer, cross-grained person, given to hard drinking, and with his blood in the condition in which a bite from a horsefly might prove a fatal poison. Everyone knew that he would not be returned a second time, and everyone said that Frank Hallett's election, should the seat become vacant, was a certainty. In a quick prophetic glance the young man saw himself in the position which he coveted—the leader of a party—a future premier of Leichardt's Land, a public personage whom the most ambitious girl in Australia might be content to own as her lover.
Then, with a thrill of triumph, he realized that Elsie too must have grasped this point in the situation, and he saw that she had worked her narrative up to it with a distinct appreciation of its dramatic importance. She had waited for him at the Crossing that she might be the first to tell him the news. From this, he must infer that she was interested in him—Frank Hallett—and not in the feats of Moonlight, and, as she phrased it, the "raising of the district." She was interested in the way in which he would take the information—in the bearing of the incident on his future fortunes with which, perhaps, she already identified herself. She had divined his secret ambition. Might it not well be that she had divined another ambition dearer and more secret still?
His breath came and went fast in the agitation of his
